The present invention relates to journey planning in a transportation system, and more specifically, to hedging risk during journey planning in a transportation system.
In today's transportation systems, especially in multi-modal transportation systems, planning a journey from one location to another has become an increasingly complex problem. A journey plan is a planned route through a transportation network and may include one or more forms of transportation and one or more stops. Often, journey plans are carried out in environments characterized by uncertainty and dynamic changes. For example, in a multi-modal transportation system the arrival and departure times of planes, busses and trains can vary depending on a wide variety of factors.
As a result, journey plans can fail during execution because of factors such as unexpected changes in the transportation network. For example, a bus or train being delayed or out of service. Currently available journey planning systems provide for computing of contingent journey plans, which are journey plans with multiple possible execution branches that attempt to take into account the likelihood that a connection between two journey segments, such as flight legs, is going to be missed. However, current systems do not take into account the robustness of a journey plan to the uncertainty in the transportation network when calculating journey plans. As a result, users may unknowingly choose a journey plan that is more likely to fail or a journey plan that can result in more serious delay than other candidate journey plans.